Bad Witch (2018)
Bad Witch is a 2018 alternative metal album by Nine Inch Nails.
The third panel of a triptych, and the one that stretches out furthest. Bad Witch landed on June 22, 2018 through The Null Corporation and Capitol Records, closing the run Nine Inch Nails began with the Not the Actual Events EP in 2016 and continued with Add Violence in 2017. Ninth studio album, short, industrial rock played with the edges left on.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross produced it themselves, as they had both EPs. That makes it the first Nine Inch Nails studio album since Year Zero in 2007 to arrive without Alan Moulder sharing the production credit, though Moulder stayed for the mix, so one pair of hands from the old sessions kept a job. Two names on the desk instead of three, and a record that sounds like it was finished in a small room rather than assembled in a large one.
It works alone. It works better as a finish, played straight after the two EPs, where the recurring textures and the narrowing mood turn three separate releases into one argument. Anyone who treated Not the Actual Events and Add Violence as sketches will want to hear what Reznor and Ross did with the space at the end of them.
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A few thoughts on Bad Witch
Pair it with things that share its grain. The Lords of Salem moves on slow dread and drone rather than shocks, so it suits a record you sit inside rather than skip through. Häxan, the 1922 silent study of witchcraft, plays as texture and unease for most of its length, good company in the dark. On the page, Batman: Damned works in painted occult noir and heavy black ink, and it reads at the tempo of the album's murkier stretches. The Wicked + The Divine turns pop stars into gods with two years to live, a comic about performance, burnout and what an audience asks of the person on stage, which lands differently once you have followed Reznor across three decades of it.